P2P TV illegal in Germany

Germany's highest court has ruled that the P2P TV application Cybersky TV is illegal. Cybersky TV allowed users to share streams of TV channels they were able to receive with their TV tuner-equipped PCs. The decision follows four years of lawsuits between Cybersky and the German cable TV network Premiere, according to heise.de.

Premiere, which is kind of like the German HBO, feared that users would utilize Cybersky TV to distribute its signals and forgo its subscription fee. Cybersky owner Guido Ciburski had previously argued that he wasn't interested in distributing repeats of Hollywood movies via Cybersky, but instead wanted to get users to stream their own live video content.

Germany's Federal Court didn't buy this argument and sided with Premiere earlier this month. The irony of the case is that Cybersky apparently never really worked. heise.de reports that previously published beta versions were completely unusable. The Cybersky website has since been take offline

Cybersky isn't Guido Ciburski's only online media venture. His company is also running the Online TV Recorder, which offerrs users an ability to download centrally captured TV shows, and the Online Music Recorder, which offers the same thing for audio recordings. Both services are of questionable legality and try to avoid being shut down through complicated enrcyption schemes.